The Celery Experiment!

We saw an intriguing thing on some blogs we follow and on a few Facebook pages.  People were re-growing food, from the bits one might usually discard.  Now, not much goes to waste here: we compost most of our vegetable matter , even in winter, to provide us with natural fertilizer; we might make vegetable soup stock from good bits; with pigs here all summer anything vegetable becomes a nice treat!  However, the idea of re-growing food seemed just to good to be true; we'd seen it done with celery, the root end of onions and even carrot tops!

We started ours April 1,  by using the cut base of a head of celery.  It was still too cold to plant outside and the sun room was stuffed with vegetables we'd seeded, so I decided to start it in water.  That way, I would also be less likely to forget about it, as I kept the glass by the kitchen sink.  I kept the water level fairly minimal, to avoid rot.  I was surprised at how quickly we had sprouts: in about a week the centre had a couple of wee shoots coming.  The little celery continued to grow and by Day 27 it was looking pretty good: check it out here.  However, things just seemed to fade out after that!  I began using a bit of seaweed fertilizer in the water, since we had it at hand for all our seedlings.  The little celery did put out some roots, finally, but very little new top growth was happening.  By Day 34 the outer rim of the stalks was beginning to decay, shrivelling up and turning brown.

We've had big fun with this project on our Facebook page: lots of comments, questions and people sharing their experience with re-growing their food.  People who planted it seemed to have better luck, so yesterday ours went into a pot on the patio!  By now, the outer, cut stalks are black and soft, with a little bit of white, moldy-looking bits that I believe are really decayed cell-wall material.  We'll see if it bounces back, now that the roots are in soil.  It being planted time here, I think we'll try another directly into a pot!  Have you ever tried to re-grow your food?

Everything's Alright - 'Dragon's Tongue' is Here!

We grow a lot of different vegetables, we need variety for our CSA families.  We start pretty much all of them from seed ourselves; yes, we may find a bedraggled tomato cheap at the garden centre, or see some nice bushy herbs and pick them up, but largely we start everything ourselves.  We pour through the seed catalogues as soon as they start arriving, circling what's new and interesting, looking for our favorites.  But somehow, I never feel secure until a pound of 'Dragon Tongue' Bean seed is in the house.  Most things we order by the packet, or maybe a large packet, but 'Dragon Tongue' we get by the pound!

I'm a bean fan since childhood.  Green beans were my thing - never liked yellow wax beans as much (I know that will get me some flack because yellow wax are a top seller for us at the Farmers Markets).  Then, in the '90's I was introduced to the purple bean 'Royal Burgundy'.  Such a disappointment that it turns green on cooking but a yummy, tender bean.  Then, I was introduced to the true French Filet bean, not the sliced up regular bean so often called filet, but the true, little skinny, tender, melt-in-your-mouth Filet.  Heavenly!  That was my favorite for a while!

We've grown a lot of different beans: heirloom, open-pollinated, new introductions, pole beans, purported great flavor and on and on.  But my absolute favorite is 'Dragon's Tongue'.    It's an heirloom, described in different places as a Dutch butter bean, a Romano type and a wax bean!  It's a big, wide, flat pod with purple streaks.  It has fabulous flavor, is never stringy, produces really well regardless of our weather, freezes nicely and - there's more: can also be grown on and saved as an awesome dried bean!  What more could a grower want?  I think we first found it in TerraEdibles great catalogue of heirlooms, and we can get the bean from Heritage Harvest, too but only West Coast Seeds offers a big, big bag!

It's huge fun for us at the Farmers Markets because we're generally the only ones who have it!  Gets lots of attention and some great 'bean' discussions are started when it's on our table.  Foodie-types who have jumped right in and tried it generally become fans, too and come back for more.   Problem is, we often pick it for Market or CSA so enthusiastically that this year we had none to dry or freeze!  Okay, and we did eat quite a bit fresh, which is the best way to eat it!  Do you have a favorite bean?

We're Growing Mushrooms!

Yep, we're giving it a try.  Got a shiitake mushroom kit from Richters Herbs, which arrived in the mail a couple of days ago.  It's a block composed of alder sawdust, millet grain, wheat bran and crushed limestone, about the size of a shoebox.  It comes already inoculated with shiitake spawn.  Looks weird:  kind of lumpy, almost moldy, muddy.....Apparently, we must keep it cool, in the 10 - 18 Celsius range (50-65F), and it needs some indirect sunlight or the light from a fluorescent lamp 3 meters (10 feet) away will do.  We must retain humidity around it.  We're going to keep it in the foyer closet, for the coolness, and we can keep the closet door just cracked a bit to let it some light.  We're going to keep it in one of our seeding trays with the plastic lid to keep the humidity up.  It requires attention; not only to keep the humidity up, but also as mushrooms start to grow we've got to be prepared to slit the plastic bag holding the block.  Fingers crossed, we'll be eating some local shiitake mushrooms in 2 - 3 weeks.